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How Taiwan is Using Technology to Foster Democracy (with Digital Minister Audrey Tang)
Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister, explains how Taiwan leverages the internet as a space for civic participation, dialogue, and consensus building.
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“Democracy is a technology. Like any […] technology, it gets better when more people strive to improve it,” says Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister. Minister Tang joins Azeem Azhar to discuss how the Taiwanese Government is using the Internet as a space for civic participation, dialogue, and consensus building.
They also discuss:
- How the open Internet helped Taiwan proactively tackle the Covid-19 outbreak at the beginning of the pandemic.
- Algorithmic co-governance, and how it can keep social media platforms in check.
- How the values of radical transparency and digital openness shape new forms of decision-making.
Further reading:
- “How Taiwan’s Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemic” (Wired, 2020)
- “How Taiwan’s ‘Civic Hackers’ Helped Find A New Way to Run a Country” (The Guardian, 2020)
- “The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws” (Technology Review, 2018)
@audreyt
@Azeem
@exponentialview
HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Business Review or its affiliates.
AZEEM AZHAR: Hi, there. I’m Azeem Azhar, and you are listening to my Exponential View Podcast. Every week, I come together with a brilliant mind to discuss the intricate dance of technology and society in a rapidly changing world. Now, my guest today is an open source, hacker, conservative anarchist who’s thinking really deeply about internet governance and internet culture. She also happens to be Taiwan’s first digital minister, Audrey Tang. Now, this is a wide-ranging conversation where Audrey and I spent a lot of time talking about internet culture and open source and the idea of open internet governance. We applied some of these ideas to frame questions like election interference, online misinformation, and echo chambers, and how you make the internet a healthy part of functioning democracies, which today many people may feel it has been somewhat antithetical towards. Now, under Minister Tang’s digital leadership, Taiwan, which only held its first general election in 1996, has had an impressive success in using some online tools to foster genuine civic engagement and consensus. I wanted to find out how they had done it. I also wanted to find out whether their commitment to digital openness and radical transparency can hold up in the face of competition and political friction with the People’s Republic of China and in the face of what could be growing fragmentation and desire for technological sovereignty for many nations across the world. It’s a really fantastic conversation. I really hope you enjoy it. One last note, before we get going, there were a couple of audio issues during this recording. Audrey is in Taiwan. I’m in London. There is some latency on the line, but do bear with the handful of sound glitches. This conversation is absolutely worth it. Minister Tang, welcome to Exponential View.
AUDREY TANG: Hello, and good local time everyone.
AZEEM AZHAR: Well, I think it’s fair to say that your path to government has been somewhat unusual. In fact, you’ve said that as Taiwan’s first digital minister, you are putting into practice what you learnt when you were couch surfing as a teenager. Can you tell us about your early experiences growing up in that internet community and how that helped evolve the values that you’ve brought to government?
AUDREY TANG: Certainly. I understand that I have a very strange condition in that I think the public servants are the most innovative people, and this very strange condition started when I was 15 years old and that was 1996. We just had our first presidential election. Around that time, I discovered this new thing called Yweb and a website, one particular website called arXiv with an X, A-R-X-I-V.
AZEEM AZHAR: Absolutely.
AUDREY TANG: It’s still around. I found that people offer their pre-prints for free. I don’t have to pay for any journals or anything, and I can write to the authors. They’re all very eager to collaborate, not knowing I’m just 14 or 15 years old. So before long, we started working together, and I told the head of my school I want to quit middle school and start my education on the Yweb. Surprisingly, after reading the email printouts, the principal said, “Okay, go ahead with it. You don’t have to go to school anymore. Starting tomorrow. I will cover for you,” meaning that she will fake the records. So-
AZEEM AZHAR: Amazing.
AUDREY TANG: That actually instilled in me this deep belief about the innovation capability of the public servants. A year later, I would find a startup working on web technologies, and I joined through the Pearl Community, the fabulous internet society that runs with this crazy idea, an open multi-stakeholder political system that still powers the internet today. So the one thing that I learned is that it doesn’t matter if I’m just 15 years old. It doesn’t matter that English is the online, native language. All that matters is a good idea and a email address, and anyone can join any working group to make the internet for the better. So this is not about who you are. It’s about a value that you hold and a value that you can contribute to the community. So this resonates with our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, who said a very inspiring statement in her inauguration speech four years ago. She said, “Before we imagine democracy as a clash, a show down between two opposing values, but nowadays democracy must become a conversation between many diverse values.” That explains the idea of rough consensus very well.
AZEEM AZHAR: It’s a fascinating story there, and there’s a lot to unpack within that. So we have the bravery, the vision of your middle school principal. We also have this engagement with the open access movement of free information and free ideas, which is arXiv, founded by Paul Ginsbarg. We have your engagement with the open source software community through Pearl, which for those who don’t know, is a language that you can use to process text amongst other things, but do much more. In fact, as a side note, the first content management system I ever wrote on the web was written in Pearl, Mac Pearl, in fact-
AUDREY TANG: Oh, wow. Okay.
AZEEM AZHAR: … because we were using the Apple platform.
AUDREY TANG: That’s great.
AZEEM AZHAR: Then you move onto this idea of essentially the marketplace of ideas, the notion that well-argued positions respectfully held can get us to better outcomes in a sense. Is that a fair summary of that part of the journey?
AUDREY TANG: Yeah. The quote by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen shows to me that democracy is a technology, like any social technology it gets better when more people strive to improve it. It’s not a tradition for hundreds of years in Taiwan. We actually amended our constitution five times during that short period of time when I was starting my first startup. Now we’re amending the constitution again to get the voting rights for 18 years olds. So, it’s a living document. When the constitution’s a living documents, when the participatory tools such as presidential hackathon, sandboxes, participatory budgeting, and so on are being invented literally every day, quadratic voting, quadratic funding, and so on being deployed in a very quick succession. It liberates us from the idea that democracy is just about each person uploading three bits every four years, which is called voting.
AZEEM AZHAR: Right. So, if we unpack that a little bit, Taiwan, that’s a mid-size country, 24 million people. It’s pretty wealthy, 55 to $60,000 per annum GDP, which is about as wealthy as America, higher GDP per capita than the United Kingdom. It also has a clear position in the sense that you are a couple of hundred miles away from the PRC. What kind of tensions did that create in the democratic functioning of Taiwan that has led to the conditions that have allowed you to do this. In 2014, there was The Sunflower Movement, which you were involved in. Help us understand what that movement was about and what your role in it was?
AUDREY TANG: In 2014, we occupied the parliament for three weeks. The legitimacy theory of the occupiers at the time was that the parliament was rushing through without substantial deliberation, the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, or CSSTA that would open up, for example, the then new 4G service telecom industry to PRC operators. So people were very worried about that, reasonably. So the people occupied the MP seats. It’s not a protest in the usual sense because more than 20 NGOs, each occupying one side of the parliament, deliberated their favorite aspect, respectively. There’s people who work on the human right angle, working on the labor right angle, the free trade versus protectionist angle, and also of course the cyber security angle, and the consensus on the street was that there’s no purely privately held companies in the PRC. Anytime the PRC wants, they go through its party branches, plug and play leadership positions for those so-called private sector enterprises.
AZEEM AZHAR: That idea that every PRC technology company is only one or two steps away from being state controlled is something that is now becoming a sort of widely held belief in the United States and the United Kingdom some five or six years later.
AUDREY TANG: That’s right. So, yeah, we are happy that people are doing the same economic assessment on whether it has been controlled by the party or not. So we reached out to consensus on the street in 2014, and it has a happy ending. The occupy was a success and people opened our collective imagination to the possibility of digital technologies to facilitate listening at scale because with radio and television, only one or few people can speak and millions listen. But for the first time in Taiwan’s political history, millions of people talk to one another, but got rough consensus, and that got ratified. The reverse mentorship system was instated to basically recruit people who are under 35 years old, including yours truly, to serve as reverse mentors to cabinet ministers. So I was paired with Minister Jacqueline Si at a time in charge of cyber regulatory reform. We innovated on ways to listen and scale for issues such as teleworking or crowdfunding or Uber.
AZEEM AZHAR: You’ve done a couple of really interesting things around how you bring citizens together to engage them through the vTaiwan platform and the Polis system is a means of generating consensus. Now, as I understand, the Polis system is a tool that allows people to identify their specific perspectives of an issue and how far away they are from a consensus. It looks a little bit like a game in a way. Could you describe how it works and perhaps give us an example where it’s been effective?
AUDREY TANG: Sure. In 2015, for example, when UberX become available in Taiwan, they were working with people with no professional driver’s licenses. It reached a very controversial situation where some people will support it because it’s new, innovative sharing economy and all that. There’s also people who say, “Well, you’re not even carpooling. Is it really sharing economy?” And things like that. So it gets ideological also. To make sure that people can actually reflect on each other’s feelings, we designed the Polis conversation, such that people can see in a prosocial social media landscape, where their friends and families stand on the issues of Uber. So people would understand that these are not nameless trolls. These are not “others.” These are your friends and families. Just maybe you didn’t talk about Uber over dinner. So we publish, of course, the facts, crowdsourced, and then ask for three weeks people’s feelings. Then we hold a face-to-face multi-stakeholder forum, inviting all the sides and everybody who contributed into it. The best ideas are the ones that take care of most people’s feelings. So, then we turned it into legislation. The user interface, very simply put, a fellow citizen sentiment. For example, I would share that liability insurance passengers is very important, and you may agree. If you agree, you move closer to me. There’s a blue circle that represents your avatar. You would move closer to people who host similar opinions. If you disagree, of course, you move body away, and then you see another sentiment that you can react on. But there is no reply button. So there is no room for troll to grow. After answering a few questions, maybe you will share what you feel for other people to resonate. Every time we run the Polis discussion, we discover that most people agree with most of their neighbor’s points on most of things most of the time, and that’s regardless of their political inclination or whatever.
AUDREY TANG: For example, on UberX, everybody agree that a fair registration system, a fair insurance system, fair taxation and so on are very important. Nowadays, Uber is a taxi fleet in Taiwan, the Q taxi. It’s registered as a Taiwan company. But all the existing taxi fleets and co-ops also benefits from surge pricing from this electronic meter. So, it proves that the social norm around UberX is actually very much reachable without the fanfare about the controversial definition of platforming economy or sharing economy.
AZEEM AZHAR: That’s really fascinating. The process that you’ve described, it reminds me a little bit of a citizens jury. So, citizens jury, just as I understand, it is a way of bringing a representative group of the population together over a few days to have a discussion, a deliberation over an issue to flesh out what the real points of agreement and disagreement are. But Polis is similar to that, but perhaps asynchronous and virtual. Are there similarities with citizen juries or things that are specifically different with Polis?
AUDREY TANG: Yeah. I think there’s two things going on. One is that we do have a face-to-face multi-stakeholder forum, not unlike the citizens juries. But instead of using sortation, we learn from the internet culture. Anyone who shares anything that is resonating with other people gets a invitation to the multi-stakeholder forum. That’s the first difference.
AZEEM AZHAR: So, that’s like an idea that comes out of open source governance, which is that if I’m contributing code to an open source project which people think is useful, my status within that project rises, and I might get included in more aspects of the governance of that project.
AUDREY TANG: That’s exactly right. Also by holding ourself to account, setting as agenda of what people resonance with, is called crowdsource agenda setting. Unlike the citizen’s jury, where the agenda is sometimes already preset, we enable the citizens to essentially set agenda and uncover the parts of the society that may be more nuanced, may be more eclectic, may be ignored when the antisocial media want to keep people addicted to those debate subject that could never get consensus. It would resonate with those eclectic voices more because they are more, well, viral in the sense that it’s idea that’s worth spreading, and it would resonate with more people. That, coupled with the idea that you can very easily share a URL to any particular Polis conversation, makes its ideas worth spreading because in any citizen assembly or citizen jury, the final question is whether the people who were there can bring back to their community the rough consensus they have reached in a deliberative space. Polis provided a simple one-click URL that can just share this, how divisive was this conversation picture that’s in everybody’s mind.
AZEEM AZHAR: One of the things that strikes me that is different to the internet models goes back to your original escape from middle school where you said you just needed an email address and some bright ideas. One of the things I noticed in Polis is that it has a sort of physical avatar icon, which means that you can identify who somebody is. You can identify their gender, you can identify their age. These are often things that skew our perception of an idea, whereas in the sort of purest old form of internet culture, no one knew we were a dog. We were just the quality of our code, the quality of our postings, and some numeric ID.
AUDREY TANG: Nowadays, when we deploy Polis, it’s true that we do ask for some sort of ID. At this moment, we ask for a SMS number that we confirm that this SMS exists. But that’s it. So, if you have a SMS and you have a email address, then that’s good enough. You may, of course, in addition to the login to join, also offer your Twitter or Facebook login, in which case will helpfully paint the pictures in a way that reflects your Twitter and Facebook friends, and actually most people participate using only the SMS and email option.
AZEEM AZHAR: Interesting. What sort of proportion of the legislative agenda or the policy agenda is now influenced or directed by what goes on in Polis and the joint platform?
AUDREY TANG: We use Polis, usually the cross ministerial issues, just like the original UberX issue, where for UberX, the ministries of transportation and communication of finance and of economy affairs, we’re actually holding very different positions even within the government.
AZEEM AZHAR: Right.
AUDREY TANG: Yeah, so for things like opening up the oceans, opening up the mountains for mountaineering, of course, the environmental protection, the conservation, Indigenous council, the tourism area, each one have a very different take on those broad policies. So we use Polis for these issues and also for diplomatic issues. We run four Polis conversations with AIT. That’s the de facto US embassy around security collaboration.
AZEEM AZHAR: I’m just curious about why you think you end up getting to consensus. When we look at open source projects, sometimes they don’t get to consensus and you get what’s known as the fork, right? The project goes in a different direction to the original. That’s certainly happened in cryptocurrencies, with Bitcoin forks as well. That’s not so much of a choice on a sort of regular basis within a government or a nation state. But what do you think it is about the design of the system that takes people towards a consensus rather than a forking?
AUDREY TANG: I think it makes sense to just define the word a little bit, because in Mandarin gòngshì is literally common understanding or even common sense. Like, it makes sense to us. I think it’s even more rough than what internet community calls rough consensus. This is more like consent, this we can live with – Something like that. But in English, consensus is a very fine document that we can sign our names on. So, just by lowering the threshold from consensus to rough consensus to just consent, you can very easily to develop common values out of different political positions. That’s all we ask for because it’s just agenda setting. This is not crowdsourcing the law proper. This is just setting what’s important.
AZEEM AZHAR: Right. It’s like product specification, almost. So, I’m curious about the other side of the public space in the digital world is the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. We’ve definitely seen across these platforms, and we should obviously include YouTube, real issues in many, many jurisdictions around polarization and extremification, radicalization that emerges across those platforms. You’ve talked about the importance of needing algorithmic co-governance with social media platforms. What do you mean by algorithmic co-governance?
AUDREY TANG: One thing is about a social sector keeping the norm, keeping the social media in check. By social sector, for example, the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit is the PTT and it’s run by the National Taiwan University.
AZEEM AZHAR: This is the place where the first notion of the coronavirus was identified. Is that correct?
AUDREY TANG: Yeah. When Dr. Liwan Leon, the whistleblower from Wuhan, posted on their social media that there’s, and I quote, “Seven new SARs cases in the Wuhanian seafood market,” it gets reposted immediately by an ID called on the PTT I think around 2:00 AM in December 31st. People upvoted it like crazy, and people actually checked the credentials. So we immediately contacted WHO without a reply, of course. We then get the health inspections going from all the flights that comes from Wuhan to Taiwan the very next day, which is the first day of January.
AUDREY TANG: So, this shows how important a social sector or a social media is because it’s not serving the whims of advertisers. It’s not serving the whim of the shareholders. In a sense, it only serves the whim of, I guess, people who study computer science in National Taiwan University because these students maintain the space. They’re far more interested in getting the words out that looks like a public health crisis than what will keep people’s attention and buy more consumer products. So there’s something that’s entirely social sector oriented in the PTT. The PTT also helped to set social norms. For example, they were one of the first to sign on the voluntary counter disinformation self-regulatory norm, and they would refuse any influence operations by money or otherwise paid sponsor campaigns during elections.
AZEEM AZHAR: How do you propose taking that model of co-governance to a $700 billion company like a Facebook?
AUDREY TANG: Yeah. Yeah. But that’s precisely what we say it to Facebook. It’s like a trade negotiation. We have a boycott, like if they don’t agree to adhere to the norm of publishing what they call the advertisement library, that’s to say the precision targeting during the elections in an open data format that everybody can analyze and ban foreign sponsors of such advertisement during the election season, then we say you may face social sanction. So even though we may or may not have jurisdiction to the Facebook corporation, per se, in Taiwan, if people socially sanction companies, they always have a better alternative, or at least a working alternative that they can live with. Very smartly, Facebook actually, for our election, the season was last December. I think we’re the first jurisdiction that they open up the entire raw data access to their advertisement library.
AZEEM AZHAR: Does social sanction mean kind of a legal sanction? You instruct the ISPs to block Facebook data or?
AUDREY TANG: No. No. It’s just boycotting.
AZEEM AZHAR: Boycotting. But that, I suppose, is then contingent on you having sufficient trust from government through to individuals that the boycott would be in some sense effective without the force of law behind it.
AUDREY TANG: A trade negotiator is only as strong as the domestic support. So, when the people, the grassroots people fight for this transparency, of course they would also fight for the same transparency in the global social media as a co-governor.
AZEEM AZHAR: Right. It’s an interesting idea. But one of the things that I’m curious about, though, is it means that within Taiwan you’ve established and you’re starting to establish a new set of norms for governing applications on the internet. So, at the highest layer of the stack. And earlier on, you talked about how you were appreciative of the multi-stakeholder rough consensus governance model of the internet society. How do you reconcile Taiwan’s approach saying to Facebook, “We have these local standards that you need to adhere to,” with your appreciation for a kind of global multi-stakeholder consensus-driven model for the internet?
AUDREY TANG: Mm-hmm. Yeah. First of all, I think even Facebook would admit that whatever social sanction they may face in Taiwan, we’re not the one to do any administrative takedown. Just like we countered the pandemic with no lockdown. We wouldn’t counter the infodemic with a administrative takedown. So, for Facebook, this is of course like a trade negotiation. This may not be the best scenario for them, but publishing the advertisements in radical transparency, in real time, still beats a arbitrary takedown by a random minister in a cabinet.
AUDREY TANG: So, what I’m trying to get at is that in multi-stakeholder forums, what’s important is this idea of running code. Running code shows people how a norm may actually be beneficial or not to people. But without a running code, like a small pilot or a sandbox, the discussion would get nowhere. So, that’s where the Facebook angle is in into this negotiation. It’s not exceptionalism for Taiwan. It’s Taiwan as a potential model for international governance on disinformation management.
AZEEM AZHAR: Right. You’ve identified a couple of interesting ideas there. Let me try to play them back. So, you talk about running code and you talk about sandboxes. I guess the observation being that in a technological system, the theory is not as useful as the actual practice where you can see the data, you can see the results, and you can see the outcome. The notion of having a sandbox is that it’s a small, somewhat constrained part of the environment where you can afford to take a little bit of a gamble-
AUDREY TANG: Risk.
AZEEM AZHAR: … because it doesn’t necessarily affect your entire business. In the case of Facebook, Taiwan is 20 million out of 2 billion users. So, it’s big enough to matter to do a good test, but it’s not big enough to take down the whole businesses.
AUDREY TANG: That’s exactly right. Also, because we don’t do administrative takedowns, the social sectors, the journalists actually have more room to work because in our K-12 curriculum, we don’t teach media literacy anymore. We teach media competence, meaning that instead of being just readers and viewers of data and journalism, everybody is essentially a producer of data and narratives. That, too, is enabled by the broadband as human rights policy that enabled when people want to fact check, for example, the presidential debates, then they can recruit thousands of, I’m sure, middle schoolers, like when I was 15 years old. If there’s such a crowdsource fact-checking, I would have joined. And so basically the idea is that everybody learns a little bit on how to fact check, on how to make memes, like funny pictures and so on, that also doubles as clarifications and so on.
AZEEM AZHAR: Now, I can’t let you say the word meme without seeing if this is true. Do you really have comedians working in your ministries?
AUDREY TANG: Yeah, definitely. In each ministry, our participation offices, unlike the media officer, talk through the press, our participation officer talk through hashtags. The difference between hashtags and traditional representatives is that the hashtag has no spokesperson, maybe some spoke spots, but no spokesperson. So the only way to make the humor more exponential than the conspiracy theories is through the joy that people partake in sharing those memes, and so it vaccinates people against outrage.
AZEEM AZHAR: It’s a very clever idea. I guess the analogy is that 60 years ago, governments had to think about how they presented themselves on radio and then on television, and now that we need to think about how we present ourselves in the memesphere, the hashtag, the kind of comedy that pushes things around. Of course, the big meme platform today is TikTok. It’s growing. It’s globally. It’s really quite engaging. Of course, Taiwan itself is a couple of hundred miles away from PRC. It is the unwilling recipient of a vast amount of cyber attack. This is a huge question. I almost feel unfair asking you this question. But as somebody who comes from the sort of similar internet culture background to myself, which was a free and open internet of permissionless innovation and multi-stakeholder governance, how do you look at the development of the internet over the coming 20 or 30 years?
AUDREY TANG: That’s a great question. I guess inter part of the internet is really what’s important to me. The idea of end-to-end innovation, precisely as you put it, permissionless innovation is really at the core of the internet of the internet. Otherwise, we might as well go back to the national lens. So the point here is when innovation happens, it’s the innovators who work with the society to prove that innovation is of some value to the society while also changing the innovation, if needed, to work with, not against, the societal norm. We see this time and again with pretty much any innovation that happen on the internet. But that presumes a certain sense of transparency and accountability of how the norm works. In Taiwan, we say we have radical transparency because as I mentioned on the joint platform, you can see each and every budget item, each and every KPI. You can demand the administrator to give account and even change the course of policy if you get 5,000 signatures. But in PRC, the word transparency means something entirely actually opposite. It means making the citizens transparent to the state. In that sense, the norm is dictated by basically the ruling party and state by making the citizens transparent. It’s the same word, different direction, right? They could then track public behaviors comprehensively in each province in the PRC is now competing on the social credit path to offer preferential treatment in education, employment, household registrations, and shame the people who violate the top-down set norms with disclosure of violator’s names, denying their travel on airplanes, and high speed trains and so on. So, for me, that’s not the kind of the environment that the kind of permissionless innovation that could occur simply because the permission to obtain, to adhere to the norm is very concentrated.
AZEEM AZHAR: But it’s not just the PRC, in a sense, that is demanding particular constraints. I mean, the Indian government is starting to make claims about data localization. The European Union is obviously starting to embed its own demand around citizen privacy. In the US, of course, we’ve seen some moves that are really with respect to certain Chinese companies, but they would also apply to other companies, presumably. So, you have this drive away from the heartland of the sort of pulse of that open, that internet culture that we talked about at the beginning. As you observe this, what do you think that that format of that governance looks like? Is it that we end up with some trusted corridors between regions and some untrusted patches of the internet? Or is it that we end up with a lot of closed national internets and you have to do some really close checking as data comes into your autonomous area. What do you think it ends up looking like over the next couple of decades?
AUDREY TANG: Well, I think it’s a great amplifier, the technologies that powers the internet today. It could, and is, being used to amplify the totalitarian technologies. For the open innovations to happen, the first thing is just to adopt what Taiwan did back in 2014, which is a clean pass. We simply say that for project with sensitive and cybersecurity concerns, the tender documents must reject PRC suppliers. It’s as simple as that. But that is really the foundation because when people are not sure of even whether the networks and devices will betray their communications, there really is no room for innovation, let alone end-to-end innovation. So only when the end-to-end ness of encryption, of course, but also the privacy protecting environment could be guaranteed, then we are talking about open innovation. So, I don’t think it is a fracture or balkanization per se. I think the core internet has always been about working with the end users in a sense there’s no end users, there’s only potential co-creators. If there are jurisdictions that take a not rule of law but rule by law approach, it’s like they drop the inter from the internet and go back to intranet, essentially. But I still think the core inter will prevail and it’s our job to make sure that people understand the difference between a rule by law, instrumental use of the law and algorithms, and the rule of law of the norm shaping that shapes the open internet.
AZEEM AZHAR: I’m curious from another historical perspective how the Taiwanese government hacker community, of which you were part, reflected or responded when we had the Edward Snowden revelations and our greater awareness of the American national security agencies’ tactical operations, which involved trying to the trustworthiness of hardware coming out of other parts of the world, including the US. Does the same norms that you talk about trustworthiness with respect to PRC apply to other state operators in other countries?
AUDREY TANG: Definitely. That’s why the preferred instant message tool in Taiwan has always been end-to-end encrypted. End-to-end encryption is not a good to have. It is a must for the Taiwanese citizenry. We understand because there’s a lot of people who work in PRC jurisdictions, but they are Taiwanese and running Taiwanese companies. Ever since the Great Firewall, wasn’t that great in the very beginning, we understand what’s it like to be in even a adversarial network environment. So, we’re very careful and aware of all this long before Snowden. I would say that our Snowden then moments came when the Great Firewall was first being built, and that was around the turn of century.
AZEEM AZHAR: One of the notions that comes out from you a lot is this notion of social pressure. You talk about media competency, not media literacy. So, we’re talking about a highly digital level of skills probably amongst the younger population, but increasingly across Taiwan as a whole. I’m curious about how that is changing the entrepreneurial environment within the island. Taiwan has got some amazing technology companies. I mean, the Pegatron, and Hon Hai or Foxconn, and TSMC, which is the major fab for the world’s semiconductors. But what it hasn’t got, to my knowledge, is really, really exceptional software-based or internet service-based companies that are of the same global scale as a Hon Hai or a TSMC. Do you think that that is something that this move towards a better understanding of internet culture could start to support? Or is there something else about the dynamics either of the market or Taiwanese business culture that means you’ll stick on the hardware side?
AUDREY TANG: Because the supply chain and the production-based community in Taiwan is so strong, it’s very natural for a software designer or interaction designer to work with those hardware parts while of course amplifying whatever software innovations they have, like through virtual reality or extended reality, working with the hardware ecosystems. So, that’s no coincidence. But I would also say that there’s more and more, for example, Google and Microsoft and other multinationals considering Taiwan to be not just a market, but actually the head culture of R&D in this part of the world, and that’s certainly true for Google and Microsoft. So many people who, they think about the software innovations of those multinationals, chances are that they are developed in Taiwan. I’m using this NOKIA flip phone and running KaiOS. I’m reminded that KaiOS is based on the Firefox OS effort, the Bluetooth Gecko, and actually most of the software engineers there was Mozilla Taiwan. So even though that we don’t print Taiwan on all the products that we make in the software world, actually there’s a lot of contributions in especially the free software world.
AZEEM AZHAR: On that note, you’ve talked a little bit about the importance of the digital commons in some of your other work. When I look at companies, the very big platform companies, like Facebook is a good example, I do see a lot of what they operate as being what I would consider the digital commons. So, I’m someone who thinks that there’s a good question to be asked about the structural separation between applications that you build on top of common infrastructure. When I look at the social graph for one example, but there are others, I think that’s the kind of thing that could reasonably be considered to live within a digital commons. Is that something that resonates with you? And if so, how would you go about making it a reality?
AUDREY TANG: Mm-hmm. Yeah. In a sense, just like any AI, that’s assistive intelligence projects, the two question always to ask is that it’s value aligned, meaning that it’s acting at the best interest of the person who use it. Also, whether it’s accountable, meaning that if things go wrong, can we hold something or someone to account? If those two things are true, it’s certainly true for the more basic technologies like React coming from Facebook. Of course, it’s community governed, and of course it’s quite accountable in their open source project governance. But I wouldn’t say the same about a social graph, however, that it’s like 100% value aligned and 100% accountable, mostly because the rules can change ahead of the norm. Taking a norm-first approach only when the social norm in the social sector have a good faith belief that if things go wrong, they can always fork and own the technology, do I consider that to be in the commons? Ethereum, for example, would fit that bill because if people don’t like the way Vitalik Buterin is running his show, they would just do a hard fork.
AZEEM AZHAR: I could spend hours on this topic, but unfortunately we’re at the top of time.
AUDREY TANG: Yeah. It’s a like three-day seminar.
AZEEM AZHAR: No. It’s amazing that there’s so much to talk about with you, Minister Tang. I’ve really enjoyed the discussion. You’ve identified yourself as a conservative anarchist. Can you briefly just put those two words together for us?
AUDREY TANG: Well, conservative means someone who respects traditions and would not hurt existing traditions in the name of progress. Then anarchist is someone who takes no orders and give no orders, but just facilitates conversation. To me, to conserve the culture of the internet, the core internet, the end-to-end principle, the open innovation, that is one of the most important thing to do. But also in Taiwan, because the official name of our state, as translated by yours truly, is a Trans-Cultural Republic of Citizens. It’s as important to conserve those cultures as with the internet culture.
AZEEM AZHAR: Audrey Tang, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me today.
AUDREY TANG: Thank you. Live long and prosper.
AZEEM AZHAR: And you. Live long and prosper.
AZEEM AZHAR: Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Please do check out some of my previous discussions that are on the interaction of technology, government, the public space, civil society. There was a brilliant one with the novelist and political scientist Elif Shafak, also with the policymaker Matthew Taylor and great discussions with the former British prime minister Tony Blair, and the current president of Estonia Kersti Kaljulaid. To stay in touch, do subscribe to this podcast or find my newsletter at www.exponentialview.co. The podcast was produced by Marija Gavrilov and Fred Casella. Ilan Goodman is our assistant producer and Bojan Sabioncello, the sound editor. Exponential View is a production of EPIIPLUS1 Limited.